Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud Dedicated is designed to address several key pillars of digital sovereignty: data residency, technological autonomy, and supply chain resilience. With isolated infrastructure, it must comply with regulations such as the GDPR and regional sovereignty rules.
After an extensive two-and-a-half-year investigation, the CMA published its findings in July 2025. The report was explicit: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft together account for roughly 80% of the UK's cloud services market, a duopoly so deeply entrenched that the watchdog recommended both companies be designated with strategic market status.
Digital infrastructure is no longer just an industry; it is strategic power. Search engines shape access to knowledge. Cloud platforms host government data. Operating systems underpin public services. When those layers are controlled abroad, so is a slice of Europe's economic and political autonomy.
With 1.5 billion euros per week in VAT revenue at stake, there are now serious concerns about digital sovereignty. If that revenue of €1.5B a week disappears, the state will have to quickly borrow more on the international capital market. In theory, America could stop this process in the Netherlands thanks to a new tender.
If you have all the information you need at hand, it should take you 10 to 15 minutes to complete the survey. This new web-based, self-service survey walks organizations through 21 multiple-choice questions. Areas covered include data residency, encryption key control, disaster recovery planning for geopolitical events, and the ability to prevent sensitive data from crossing borders. The goal is to move digital sovereignty from vague policy talk to a measurable "sovereignty baseline" that IT and business leaders can act on.
They can no longer use e-commerce, book hotels online or hire a car. Their home smart devices ignore them. Credit cards from European banks no longer function, because Europe has still not developed its own EU-wide payments system, so most electronic purchases go through Visa and Mastercard. Converting euros to foreign currencies is extraordinarily difficult because everything passes through dollars. Living in Europe is no protection against Donald Trump bricking your digital life.
There was and is method to it. Type approval means that the device won't kill you, won't jam your airwaves, won't burst into flames, and other desirable negatives. If a business buys approved equipment, it won't invalidate its insurance, and many other legal protections and permissions flow. When the system stops working, which it does when individual consumers can buy cheap stuff directly from overseas, fiery death can follow.
You may have noticed that many European Union (EU) governments and agencies, worried about ceding control to untrustworthy US companies, have been embracing digital sovereignty. Those bodies are turning to running their own cloud and services instead of relying on, say, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. If you prize your privacy and want to control your own services, you can take that approach as well.
They called out about half a dozen particular instances of what they considered to be bullshit technology. We were too busy laughing sympathetically to whip out a laptop to make notes, but as best as we can recall the sequence, they were: Containers Kubernetes The "Cloud" Anything at all "as a Service" The Blockchain - anything, everything, based on it And now, arguably the biggest and worst of all, "generative AI"
This week's practical must-reads from The Local feature advice on what to do if you live in an area under a flood warning, the latest snow news for winter sports lovers, an update on France's Budget now that we have one, and why the Île de Ré is so expensive. This week, the French Riviera and parts of western France have been under high alert for flooding. It is the leading natural disaster affecting France and can lead to fatalities. Here's the crucial advice to follow if you are caught in a flood where you live.
Against that backdrop, Europe's reliance on American-made AI begins to look more and more like a liability. In a worst case scenario, though experts consider the possibility remote, the US could choose to withhold access to AI services and crucial digital infrastructure. More plausibly, the Trump administration could use Europe's dependence as leverage as the two sides continue to iron out a trade deal. "That dependency is a liability in any negotiation-and we are going to be negotiating increasingly with the US," says Taddeo.
According to Li Mandri, ING's centralised approach to AI development has resulted in a high success rate for pilot projects, with 90% moving to production compared to the industry average of 30. The bank has standardised on cloud-hosted AI models from preferred partners, which are then made available globally, allowing ING to scale. He says the platform is centrally managed with risk controls, guardrails and real-time monitoring.
Digital sovereignty has outgrown its niche as an IT concern and is now firmly on the boardroom agenda. This has been fueled in no small part by geopolitical concerns. However, while geopolitics may have pushed it into the spotlight, at its core digital sovereignty is about one thing: keeping the business running no matter what happens. When critical systems fail, there is always a cost.
Without a fundamental shift in how newsrooms think about and build technology, journalism's independence is in jeopardy. The threats are not abstract. Link referrals to newsroom websites are declining from both search engines and social media sites because tech companies want to keep users engaged in their own platforms. Information held in the cloud can be subpoenaed, often in secret, putting sources and journalists at risk.
Europe's long-running struggle to define digital sovereignty - and to turn it into something practical - is reaching an inflection point. That was the message at this year's Gaia-X Summit in Porto, where executives and governments argued that the continent finally has the technical foundations for sovereign data sharing. All it needs now is the political will, economic models, and global partnerships to make it work at scale.
The Dutch government will investigate the consequences of the American IT company Kyndryl's takeover of the Dutch cloud service provider Solvinity. The company plays an essential role in the national identity system DigiD. Solvinity believes that the collaboration with Kyndryl will offer more opportunities to continue innovating in IT management, security, and automation. "We are aware of the questions that are circulating in the market," said CEO Daniëlle Schuur earlier this month.
A survey of CIOs and tech leaders in Western Europe has found 61 percent want to increase their use of local cloud providers amid global geopolitical uncertainty. Around half (53 percent) said geopolitics would restrict their use of global providers in the future. Gartner surveyed 241 CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe between May and July. It found that ongoing geopolitical tension was fueling concerns over digital sovereignty.
Lots of companies are announcing AI this and AI that, but few of them offer more than new AI lipstick on an old pig when you look at them closely. Then, there's what SUSE is doing with its release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 (SLES 16), available today. This new version is positioned as an AI-ready operating system tailored to the demands of today's hybrid cloud, data center, and edge computing environments.
Even before Azure had a global failure this week, Austria's Ministry of Economy had taken a decisive step toward digital sovereignty. The Ministry achieved this status by migrating 1,200 employees to a Nextcloud-based cloud and collaboration platform hosted on Austrian-based infrastructure. This shift away from proprietary, foreign-owned cloud services, such as Microsoft 365, to an open-source, European-based cloud service aligns with a growing trend among European governments and agencies. They want control over sensitive data and to declare their independence from US-based tech providers.
